George Jonas on Jenni Rivera: Being a celebrity is risky business

Jenni Rivera: Being a celebrity is risky business

It’s more dangerous to be a fireman than a celebrity, but as contenders for a hazardous occupation, celebrities are right up there. On some lists, they will make top 10; on others, they’ll be perching beside roofers and loggers. The reason? Instinctively, you might blame rivals, critics, the paparazzi, fans. Not so. It’s travel. Travel kills.

Order, please! Belay the pandemonium. Travel agents, hold your fire. Ministers of tourism: Sit! I’m not knocking travel. Travelling is marvelous. It’s an activity we all like to do. The trouble is, celebrities actually do it. They do it a lot, and some die in the process.

Last Sunday, it was the popular Mexican-American singer, Jenni Rivera, who perished along with six other souls when their chartered Lear jet vanished from radar about 10 minutes after departing Mexico’s Monterrey Airport for high altitude (2,700 metres) Toluca Airport. The flight reportedly had reached cruising altitude at around 35,000 feet when it rapidly descended to 9,000 feet, then disappeared. The celebrity was in her early 40s; so was the Lear 25 jet. The pilot was 78. The authorities are investigating.

There’s no suggestion that either the plane’s age or the pilot’s (whose name is variously reported as Miguel Perez Soto or Soto Torres) had anything to do with the disaster, though both will no doubt receive careful scrutiny. But those magnificent men and their flying machines can, if properly maintained, function safely for a very long time. There’s nothing inherently dangerous in equipment that is nearing the half-century mark, or an operator who is past the three-quarter century mark, as long as they have been well looked after. It’s only that the cost of maintaining old people and old machines increases to the point where it becomes more economical to trade them for newer models.

When it comes to human activities, the real variance in hazard doesn’t lie in the specifics of the experience, such as “pilot’s age” or even “plane’s quality of maintenance.” The real variance lies in frequency of exposure. The rule is simple. Travel kills; staying put saves lives.

This being so, you’d think most people want to stay put. You’d be wrong. Most people want to travel. They don’t look at travelling as the price of celebrity, but as its reward.

As a result, celebrities fly and die like flies. Examples abound. Take only Latin-American culture, in my lifetime. In the year I was born, 1935, people mourned the Argentinean tango-king, Carlos Gardel, killed in a plane crash in Medellín, Colombia. The best-known Latin American who perished was probably Richie Valens, of “La Bamba” fame. The father of Chicano rock was killed in a 1959 plane crash along with American music stars Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. Two years earlier, the Mexican sensation Pedro Infanta piloted himself to his death on a flight to Mexico City. And, of course, there were the legendary man-eating rugby players of 1972, who ended up as dishes or diners after the Uruguayan Air Force’s twin turboprop Fairchild transporting them from Chile went down in the Andes mountains.

This is just a cursory list of Latin American celebrities and air disasters, but celebrities and planes don’t mix — or, as a mordant wit said after looking at a crash site, mix only too well. Victims have always included famous people from many fields, not only show business.

The Canadian scientist Sir Frederic Banting perished in 1941 when his Lockheed Hudson bomber suffered a rare double engine failure on takeoff from Gander. On the other side of the war, Autobahn-designer Dr. Fritz Todt’s Junkers 52 blew up on takeoff in 1942, something even rarer than double engine failure. In the same year, a Siebel Si 204, piloted by Baron Carl-August von Gablenz, the founder of Lufthansa, bought the farm after experiencing what the record describes only as “mechanical failure.” In Scotland, the Duke of Kent was killed when his plane flew into high ground. In those days, this type of navigational error wasn’t yet called CFIT, Controlled Flight Into Terrain, but it was occurring commonly enough to earn the abbreviation as pilots started flying in bad weather more and more.

In 1943, Admiral Isorok Yamamoto was also killed when his Mitsubishi G4M Transport went down in the vicinity of the Solomon Islands. There was a jolly good reason, though, for the celebrity commander’s crash. His transport was hit by American fighters.

Who is on top of the danger list? Certainly not celebrities. Nor is it firefighters, soldiers or cops. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, it’s fishermen. Their death rate per 100,000 was 200 in 2011. No one else comes even close. Aircraft pilots are 3rd, at 57.1 per 100,000.